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The discovery of a new dinosaur species shows not only the diversity of life at the time of the dinosaurs, but also that North America was most likely broken in half by a shallow sea millions of years ago, allowing different species to rise and flourish.

The dinosaur, roughly the size of a dog, had one horn and large crest on its skull, similar to a triceratops, and lived in eastern North America around 100 million years ago, according to a press release from the University of Bath.

The discovery was made by Dr. Nick Longrich of the Milner Center for Evolution at the United Kingdom's University of Bath. Longrich's discovery hinges on the discovery of a unique jaw bone that does not match any of the Leptoceratopids on record and suggests an entirely new species.

At the time, the family of dinosaurs to which the species belonged, Leptoceratopids, roamed the Earth, North America was divided by a shallow sea called the Western Interior Seaway that ran from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.

"Just as many animals and plants found in Australia today are quite different to those found in other parts of the world, it seems that animals in the eastern part of North America in the Late Cretaceous period evolved in a completely different way to those found in the western part of what is now North America due to a long period of isolation," Longrich said.

"This adds to the theory that these two land masses were separated by a stretch of water, stopping animals from moving between them, causing the animals in Appalachia to evolve in a completely different direction, resulting in some pretty weird looking dinosaurs," he said.

Leptoceratopids are the much smaller cousins of the famed Triceratops, and the fossil that led to the species' discovery is the first of the Ceratopsian family that was found in North America.